Video interview – The Tribute Projects

                      Video retrieved from youtube.com

Tribute to Sam is an inverse-publishing project that started on May 26^th 2011.  It honors Samuel M. Steward and all those who overcome suffering with grace, pride and personal confirmation.  In their trying journeys, suffering is just another bug on the windshield – finding happiness, their fertile crescent.

Over the last year the tribute’s mission has evolved from being a one-year experiment to a life’s work.  At its core, it is dedicated to respecting, preserving and conveying ancient and contemporary traditions of intellectual inquiry –  talking, cooking, drawing, writing, fucking, learning, imagining, teaching; living.

So this project is fundamentally like any other learning environment.  Though, it slightly differs in a few ways.  First, as an inverse publishing project, all pieces remain on tributetosam.com – free – during the creative process.  Being an open-forum website, readers can comment on what they read.

Anonymity depends entirely on the commenter.    The posted remarks become part of the end product – a series of existential non-fiction picture-books exploring life’s journeys, intersections and destinations – available in hardcopy ($10.00 – $70.00) and e-book ($3.99) formats at online bookstores and this site.

The hard copies preserve ancient and enlightened traditions of print-pressing, writing and language.  Contemporarily, e-books offer the same archival value of hardcopies with the versatility of the digital interface.  However, unlike a web-blog, the tribute strictly follows English rules of grammar and syntax.

Free website publications offer keener eyes a chance to inspect while also giving those unable to purchase the books a chance to read and participate in the conversation.  Learning must never be restricted by the want of something as arbitrary and temporary as money; if anything, it must be free.

The last big way this learning platform differs is in its range of discussion topics; Tribute to Sam inquiries into sex, God and everything in between.  These seemingly unrelated belief systems have physical, emotional and intellectual intersections with one another; some beneficial, others more destructive.

These intersections – sex, gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, ideology, etc. – help construct personal and social identities.  To be able to better understand these daunting concepts of our existence, Tribute to Sam creates a living map with photographs and strings of words.

Please join the conversation; your contribution only enriches it.

O.